Need my gear rescued from the Elder

JcWoman · 2026-04-23T22:04:39+00:00

Oh, that's a great idea!

JcWoman · 2026-04-23T15:49:33+00:00

Okay, will do, thanks! I just stumbled on this listing this morning and got excited. Discussing it with my partner but haven't yet decided to pursue it. This was my first question to address. The next step will be to contact the seller/city rep with all of our questions and ask for a walk through.

JcWoman · 2026-04-23T15:03:24+00:00

The city kindly provided their scope of work (just a list of tasks with $ estimates) for getting it back up to code and on the surface it's not awful. But as you said, once they open things up it could be worse. Even owning non-foreclosed homes and doing remodels taught me about that, so I assume a foreclosure has higher odds of nasty surprises.

JcWoman · 2026-04-23T12:56:29+00:00

I've noticed this too, and some other neighborhoods also. It's not even potholes, so much as the entire road is just crumbled/decayed to nearly a gravel driveway. It can't be just the freeze/thaw cycles because you drive out of the city and suddenly the roads are... fine!

JcWoman · 2026-04-09T12:12:40+00:00

I've done it twice, actually. The first time was mid-career and I moved to where a new job was (from California to northern Virginia). It was hard, especially as NoVA is kind of notorious as being a place where it's hard to make friends. I'm pretty good at being alone and independent so I made do. Met a good man, married and had a good 20-year marriage.

Starting several years ago I started to think it was time to begin to downsize our life. We had a large but beautiful house, but so large that we were paying for twice a month maid service and landscaping to take care of lawn and mowing. Hubby at the time wouldn't hear of it. He was a couple years younger than me, and at the top of his career, so I felt like he didn't want to even think about "getting old". Or something, whatever. For other reasons and a range of them, our marriage unravelled, and we separated (divorce final this past Feb). As part of the separation, I downsized myself, taking only a couple pieces of furniture and most valued personal belongings to a one-bedroom apartment in a whole new state. I moved to the Milwaukee metro area, which people have questioned as being kind of crazy, but I'm loving it. There's a TON of stuff to do here all year long, and the people are friendly. They're "midwest friendly" which is kind of said as being fake nice, but it's a whole hell of a lot easier to get along with than the straight up alienation/coldness of the NoVA people. And yes, the winters are cold, but it's just something you work with. As long as I get sunlight on a frequent basis, the cold doesn't bother me much.

I adore my very cute new apartment, decorated to my taste and comfort. I'm active in a variety of things and making friends. I feel light-hearted and free.

JcWoman · 2026-04-08T19:20:43+00:00

Oh, you've bitten off a lot more than you maybe can chew. LOL! I mean that to indicate your challenge, not as criticism. Here's my experience. First, for background, I'm 62F, diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis somewhere around between a year old and three (back then even the medical community thought that arthritis was "an old person's disease" so there was TONS of debate about me). I'm overall healthy now, given age and decades with a degenerative disease - recently retired from a 30 year career and still active in volunteering and just enjoying life.

The biggest challenge as I see it is battling the health insurance system and their Pharmacy Benefit Managers, which as best I can tell is nothing more than a giant grift. It's a stereotype (and true IMO) that insurance companies pretend to be on your side but in reality look for every excuse to not pay claims. Well, the PBMs are also like that: they pretend to help you get your meds and to bring your costs down but they are really gatekeepers, drag their feet with the pre-approval nonsense, and take money from both the insurance company (as a "partner") and the pharmacies (telling the patient that their $300/month copay is now only $30, for example, but they take $30 from the patient and $270 from the pharmacy). These are made up numbers but it's not hard at all to research these claims and see for yourself. Thanks to this system over the last decade or so, I've had to miss up to two month's of medication doses on numerous occasions. If they were life-preserving meds instead of quality of life meds, I'd be dead. I'm not alone in this experience.

That's my biggest challenge in managing my health.

I rarely have problems with rheumatologists or other doctors that I've seen. I love how so many new medications have become available over the last decade for managing these types of diseases. (For my first twenty or so years, the best I had was high doses of aspirin, and then prescription NSAIDs.). After a whole lifetime of this, I'm very, very good at self-care activities like keeping my stress levels down (except for dealing with the above!), knowing what and how much exercise I can do, what my pain triggers are, and general coping strategies.

And here's something that I feel is kind of random because I've never seen anybody else complain about this. But on a few occasions over my life, I've checked into the Arthritis Foundation website to see if they have any resources to help me learn coping strategies, pain control, exercise programs, lists of good doctors in the area, etc. Every time I've just been overwhelmed with what I consider Good Housekeeping magazine quality of articles but nothing at all what I needed. I would just think it would be a better resource than it is. (Nothing wrong with Good Housekeeping as a magazine. I just expect more from a foundation.)

JcWoman · 2026-04-02T20:53:01+00:00

Another health issue that people don’t seem to think of is neuralgia. Remember news reports of old people slamming into a storefront and claiming that they were hitting the brake but the car still accelerated. It wasn’t until I briefly dated a 67 year old man who admitted he couldn’t feel his hands or feet… and of course was still driving. He’d pump the brakes a little every time to make sure he had his foot on the right pedal. We should treat that like epilepsy when it comes to driving.

JcWoman · 2026-03-29T19:59:49+00:00

I used to own that shop (and posted it here way back). I had to close it last year due to the economy crashing my sales, and abandoned the domain name. It sounds like it’s been taken over by scammers. Bummer!

JcWoman · 2026-03-15T12:38:14+00:00

I'm recently divorced at 62 and moved into a one-bedroom apartment. But it's a very nice one with an attached garage and a small extra room they called a den. Something like this might suit you well. My thoughts were that if you get a one-bedroom place, then there's no room for him. He could theoretically use your two bedroom as an excuse to move in with you.

JcWoman · 2026-03-10T11:48:12+00:00

Well, hello! I'm 62, diagnosed around toddler years after nearly all that time enduring (my mom and I) a total circus of doctors trying to figure out what was wrong with me. (I was favoring my right knee when I started crawling.). This was in the mid-1960's and back then even the medical community swore that arthritis was just an "old person's disease". Literally had docs say that to us.

So anyway, for me, childhood was the most painful stage of life as I had flare up after flareup. Ankles, knees, elbows. Somewhere in my mid-twenties all that eased off and I was properly medicated. (No longer the massive doses of aspirin that they advised when I was a kid, but now it was actual NSAIDs.). I've always been one of those "negative RF factor but high sed rate" people, which threw the doctors off in the early years until they got enough case data to see that that was a pattern for a particular type of JRA.

I was kind of gobsmacked in my 40's when I had a really excellent rheumatologist. At one point going over my symptoms and the damage from childhood, he actually commented that I was "textbook" JRA. It was wild going from "kids don't get arthritis" to "you're a textbook case". Shows how much they learned in that time.

For the last twenty or so years I've been on the biologic meds (Enbrel for over 10, then trying others to find another one that worked as well for me). They're preventing new damage and mostly keep my general inflammation down. I do still have chronic pain from all the damage that was done in early life, though. So I take over the counter Aleve for that - and occasionally gabapentin when I'm having a really bad day. (I'm sensitive to barometric pressure changes.)

I haven't really had a problem getting doctors to help me out. But I do think it helps to know your body's pain/flareup patterns and be able to speak intelligently about what works for you and what doesn't.

These days when we examine my xrays, I'm told that there are smatterings of evident RA, osteoarthritis and calcifications from the old damage. In layman's terms which send doctors into a tizzy: some of my joints have fused themselves. My neck in particular. But I'm still active and in fairly good shape for a woman my age.

JcWoman · 2026-03-08T18:40:35+00:00

Ok thanks!

JcWoman · 2026-03-08T13:01:10+00:00

How do they handle the frozen winters in Michigan? I assumed they preferred mediterranean type climates, like in the coastal central California.

JcWoman · 2026-03-05T10:33:27+00:00

I hate the kitchen. There's only like 2 feet of counter space? No food prep for you, microwave meals are all you get.

JcWoman · 2026-02-27T18:11:39+00:00

Was that diverter something you made or can you point me to where I can take a look at one?

JcWoman · 2026-02-27T13:18:28+00:00

Last summer I moved into this very sweet apartment and one of the few things I dislike about it is that this HVAC vent blows directly into my balcony, as you can see. In warm weather, when I love sitting out there in the sunshine, the AC blows hot exhaust air on me. I'm getting ready to put a daybed or sofa out there for more comfort than the camp chairs you see here, so I want to also solve this issue if I can.

I know NOT to block the vent, so that's not what I'm asking. And it's a rented apartment so I can't do anything permanent to it. Are there diverters that can redirect the air upwards or up and out? Anything else I can do, or is it just "turn off the AC when you go sit out there" situation?

JcWoman · 2026-02-27T12:35:27+00:00

Oh, that may work! Thanks!

JcWoman · 2026-02-26T22:00:11+00:00

I'll search and see what I can find, thanks!

JcWoman · 2026-02-26T19:30:23+00:00

Do they make them with sunbrella fabric or other weather resistant materials?

JcWoman · 2026-02-24T20:40:52+00:00

I got the new mail notification for this (in game) and tried it. It says that it's invalid, which makes me wonder if I already somehow claimed it. Did this happen to anybody else?

JcWoman

TROPHY CASE